Games – Page 88 – Robot Claw

Brave New World

May 1, 2011

That iPad MMO I tweeted about yesterday? Here’s my character, right after her creation:

Here she is fighting a crocodile:

The game reminds me a lot of vanilla WoW. It has all the trappings including guilds, grouping, crafting, auctions, quests, talent trees (I’m fire), gryphons teleporting, maps etc.

In fact one of the reasons I’m playing the hell out of it is because I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard shut it down due to copyright infringement 🙂

Here’s Momomo checking out the first town:

When an MMO can look, play and control this well on a phone (yes, the app is universal) – I have to believe the ‘big boys’ of the industry would be silly to not be a little concerned.

Game Dev Story

April 30, 2011

Game Dev Story is a charming iOS game that has had me hooked for the better part of the last week.

In the game you run a game company, and your goal is to succeed in the competitive world of the game industry. You choose which games to make (style and genre) and which system to make them for and then release them and hope they succeed! With success comes money and the opportunity to hire more and better staff. Eventually you’ll be upgrading your offices, making sequels to hit games, winning industry awards and even releasing your own console.

The above shows the first console I developed, the strikingly named Satan Engine. This was 17 years into the game, and in real-world-equivalent times this 64-bit Blu-ray drive monster was going up against 16 bit offerings from ‘Senya’ and ‘Intendro’. Obviously I wiped the carpet with them, quickly gaining 26% of the market. (The slightly blurred graphics are because I am playing an iPhone game at double-size on the iPad)

This was helped of course by my launch game:

Since Acrosatan X I have released a few other games, including a ‘music’ style game in the genre ‘cuties’ (called Pantsu Dreaming) that scored 40/40!

Even so, it was the long awaited sequel to Beating Jesus (BS: I expect a comment on this) that would be my first Game Of The Year. I guess those F1 Driving fans are more numerous than I thought?

The game is very cute and light-hearted, and one nice element is that there are certain… unusual staff members that can periodically be available for hire. The best is this guy:

Yep, Grizzly Bearington the legendary bear-producer. At his job interview, he said he had left the woods in search of honey! He’s perhaps not the most skilled employee I have, but he certainly brightens the office with his presence:

I’ve sunk many hours into Game Dev Story, and considering it was only $1.99 (on sale from $3.99) it’s well, well worth the price. There are few enough Japanese developed games on the US App Store, but considering the quality of this one (and the Cave shooters) I can only hope we’ll see more in the future.

Mega Mantis

April 21, 2011

My brother got me this kit for my birthday:

I just assembled it. The parts are all aluminium, and the nuts and bolts that hold everything together are tiny!

The instructions are clear and very nicely done, with a 1:1 scale list of parts on the other side. It is very easy to know how to put the kit together:

Actually putting it together was quite challenging though. It took me about an hour in total, and most of the time was consumed by trying to get nuts on the end of very tiny bolts with very little room in which to maneuver. Of course I was stubborn, and never went and got tweezers. This particularly step was by far the worst:

The springs are there to make the wings have a bit of ‘give’. Unfortunately although the kit has a lot of springs, none of the others do anything and are purely for visual impact, such as this one:

I did like how some of the parts were made of ‘soft aluminium’ (as described by the manual) and can be bent as the owner sees fit. The antennae are an example:

Here’s a shot to show the scale of the finished mantis:

And here is a dramatic shot showing this mantid golem in it’s natural habitat: